He continued to sing a passage from Der Freischütz, and did not reply; thereupon I opened the door.
I entered a room in which there was a mattress with a wretched coverlid thrown over it, in one corner. A rickety chair, a few broken jars and a long board which served doubtless as a table, but which was then standing against the wall—that was all the furniture. Leaning on the sill of the window, which was open, was a man, still young, whose good-humored, bloated face was not unfamiliar to me. He was in his shirt sleeves, and was seated after the manner of tailors, with his knees outside the window, a position which made him likely to fall into the courtyard at the slightest forward movement.
On my arrival he stopped in the middle of a trill and exclaimed:
“Hello! I thought it was the concierge to ask for money again. I should have said to him: ‘prout, prout!’ Sit you down, monsieur.”
I sat down, for my neighbor seemed quite unceremonious; he had not risen. I do not know whether he thought that I had come to hear him sing; but he seemed inclined to resume his performance. I stopped him at once.
“Monsieur, I am your neighbor.”
“Indeed! you are my neighbor, are you? Beside me or below?”
“Oh, yes! it’s a fact that on this floor there’s nobody but the cooks of the house, all old women, unluckily. They don’t sing, they don’t make love, they don’t know how to make anything but sauces,—reduced consommés, as the one from the first floor says. For my part, I would give all her consommés for a bottle of beaune. Ah! how delicious beaune is! If I had any, I would give you some; but it is three days now that I haven’t drunk anything but water. Prout, prout! I must make the best of it.”
While the tailor was talking, I examined him, because I was confident that I had seen him somewhere before, but I could not remember where.